ARTICLES ABOUT MISSILES BY DATE - PAGE 4

PERRY, Georgia (Reuters) - On a cloudless, windswept Georgia morning 100 miles south of Atlanta, a rescuer dangled 30 feet in the air, secured by rappelling ropes, wielding a jackhammer, as he drove the drill into a massive concrete slab designed to mimic the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. It took about an hour to punch a hole big enough to reach mock disaster "victims" trapped between the slab and an exterior wall. Nearby more rescuers stood by a replica of an apartment building damaged during the 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake.

WARSAW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Poland has decided to speed up its tender for a missile defense system, a defense ministry spokesman said on Thursday, in a sign of Warsaw's disquiet over the tension between neighboring Ukraine and Russia. "The issues related with Poland's air defense will be accelerated," spokesman Jacek Sonta said. "Poland plans to choose the best offer for its missile defense in the next few weeks. " The NATO member had planned to reduce the number of bidders by June, but the crisis in Ukraine and concerns about Russia's annexation of Crimea have prompted officials to speed up the timetable.

It was while sitting in a Missouri federal courtroom watching his peace activist wife refusing to pay $424.47 in restitution to reduce an 11-year sentence for damaging a nuclear missile silo that Joe Gump decided that he, too, would take what he liked to refer to as a "retirement" in prison. Mr. Gump ramped up his own antiwar efforts. In August 1987, 16 months after his wife was arrested at the silo in Holden, Mo., Mr. Gump and Jerry Ebner, broke into a K-9 missile silo near Butler, Mo. The two men poured blood in the shape of a cross on the concrete silo, snipped the cables to the alarm system, smashed the electrical outlets and took a sledgehammer to the geared tracks "That day, while many others supported our action, what it dwindled down to was just him and me," said Ebner, who received a 40-month prison sentence, while Mr. Gump received 30 months.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said on Wednesday it had added $750 million to Northrop Grumman Corp's contract to manage the information technology of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system. The new contract brought the potential value of the contract to $3.25 billion from $2.5 billion, the Pentagon said in its daily digest of major weapons contracts. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Richard Chang)

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles have been trafficked out of Libya to Chad, Mali, Tunisia, Lebanon and likely Central African Republic, with attempts made to send them to Syrian opposition groups, according to a U.N. report on Tuesday. An independent panel of experts monitoring U.N. sanctions on Libya, that include an arms embargo imposed at the start of the 2011 uprising that ousted leader Muammar Gaddafi, reported that the weapons, known as MANPADs, that were found in Mali and Tunisia "were clearly part of terrorist groups' arsenals.

* U.S. general suggests regional ballistic shield * Deployed Israeli systems already reach over borders * Iran, Syria crises a shared concern in the region By Dan Williams TEL AVIV, March 10 (Reuters) - A U.S. general proposed on Monday that Israel upgrade its anti-missile systems to include neighbouring Jordan and possibly Egypt, and an Israeli official cautiously welcomed the idea. The two Arab countries that have full peace treaties with the Jewish state share some of its concern regarding the disputed nuclear programme of Iran and the civil war wracking Syria - both states with long-range missile arsenals.

By Andrea Shalal WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Missile Defense Agency on Wednesday said it is requesting $1.9 billion over the next five years to overhaul the ground-based U.S. missile defense system managed by Boeing Co and improve its reliability. Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Admiral James Syring told reporters Tuesday that the agency was asking for about $300 million in fiscal 2015 to redesign the Raytheon Co "kill vehicle" that hits and destroys an enemy missile on contact, add a new long-range radar and fund other measures to help the system better identify and track enemy missiles.

WASHINGTON, March 5 (Reuters) - Raytheon Co has won a contract valued at up to $350 million to increase the number of Standard Missile-3 Block 1B missiles and other materials to 44 from 8, the U.S. Defense Department said on Wednesday. The contract award runs through September 2016, according to the Pentagon's daily digest of major weapons contract. The SM-3 missile is a defensive weapon used by the Navy to destroy short-to-intermediate-range ballistics missiles.